The Beautiful and the Damned (22 page)

Yadhagri was an idealist, one who had placed his faith in an unsuccessful movement. He had not become a big politician or even a junior functionary in a powerful party. He talked to me about how he had been influenced by Marxist literature – ‘literature’ was the word he used – as a young man in the late sixties. He had held a modest government job which he left in 1975, when the then prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties throughout the country and imposed an ‘Emergency’ that gave complete autocratic powers to herself and to a small coterie of advisers. Yadhagri had gone underground, as had many others. The man who had been his political mentor was ‘encountered’ that year, by which he meant that the police had killed him and declared it as an encounter where both parties were armed. From 1978, Yadhagri had participated in both the armed movement of the party and in its non-violent protests, although his recent activities had largely been overground in nature.

I hadn’t been particularly interested in the meeting with Yadhagri when Prabhakar had first mentioned it. I thought of it as something I had to go through in exchange for the help he was giving me. As I sat in Yadhagri’s house, the rain cascading outside on empty, dark streets, I understood that I had been brought there because no journalist from the city would have any interest in interviewing Yadhagri. The overground Maoists were irrelevant in India, neither a potent political force on the national scale where what counts is money or identity politics nor as threatening as the underground Maoists with their liberated zones. But although it was 11 p.m. and I was tired and hungry, I gradually became interested in Yadhagri’s story in spite of myself, especially given the setting in which I was listening to him. He was professorial in manner, simply dressed, the walls of his tiny house lined with leftist books and portraits of Marx and Lenin. But,
along with his comrades, there were sons and daughters coming in and out of the sitting room, including a granddaughter who came and lay down on his lap, staying there quietly as he spoke to me of a deferred revolutionary struggle and the importance of the ‘mass line’ approach, which involved working at rousing the masses before the revolution could be launched. The simplicity of the surroundings as well as the idealism it evoked seemed intensely familiar, until it brought to me, in a sudden, unbearable wave of nostalgia, my childhood and a time in India when many middle-class households had been like this, animated by literature, art and politics, and where people still lived in a community and believed in social justice.

When we went back to Prabhakar’s house for dinner, I took a closer look at the neighbourhood. There was a white bust in the middle of the street, recognizable by its hat, its pencil-line moustache and its fine, aquiline features as a representation of Bhagat Singh, the Indian socialist hanged by the British for killing a police officer. On the other side of the street from Prabhakar’s house was a union office for workers who made beedis. The office was closed now, at midnight. The neighbourhood was dark and quiet except for bits of light spilling out from the windows and the sound of rain dripping off leaves. I was surprised by how clean and tree-lined the neighbourhood was, even though the people who lived there were mostly party activists and well below the middle class.

When I mentioned this to Prabhakar, he looked thoughtful. ‘It was a dump, this land. It belonged to the government. We seized the land because all the comrades needed a place to stay. We were working for the party and none of us had much money. There were police beatings, we held protests, but eventually the government allowed us to stay on. We made it what it is now.’

It was a story of social mobility, but a rather unexpected one. Prabhakar had grown up in the Khammam district of Telangana. His father, a shopkeeper, had been a Communist and participated in the Telangana peasant uprising from the late forties to the early fifties. Prabhakar, in turn, had dropped out of school after the seventh grade. He had become a Maoist and gone underground in the early seventies. While he belonged to a middle caste, he had married outside it.
Godavari, his wife, was a Dalit. But their children were entering middle-class professions, with the daughter an IT worker and the son finishing a journalism degree.

‘What do they think of your work?’ I asked.

‘They’re proud of me, of us,’ Prabhakar said. ‘My daughter might work in Infosys, but she doesn’t look down on what I do.’

We were late getting to the collector’s office in the morning. I had stayed the night at the hotel, and although I called Prabhakar a number of times, he showed up only around nine thirty. The appointment had been made for ten, and we reached the collector’s office half an hour late. We sat in the clerk’s room. A man wearing a white uniform decorated with a black sash and a big brass badge that said ‘Attender’ walked into the collector’s room carrying a tube of toothpaste. He returned a little while later carrying an empty bowl. It appeared that the collector was brushing his teeth: had he been in the office all night? I suddenly overheard Prabhakar explaining to the clerk why we were late. Even though I didn’t know Telugu, I could understand perfectly well from Prabhakar’s slight shake of the head towards me that he was saying that I had overslept. I felt momentarily indignant, but then I thought it was funny that even a Maoist comrade needed to save face. Later, I would find out that Prabhakar had been at a hospital all night, taking care of a fellow activist’s son who had broken an arm in an accident.

The collector was holding a video conference with the head office in Hyderabad at eleven, and our only chance to see him would be after the conference. We decided to take a tea break and sat outside at a stall chatting with a couple of local reporters. A man without feet or arms made his way towards us, pulling himself painfully through the dust, sandals strapped to all four of his stumps. When he had left, the reporters told me that he was a leper who wanted to complain to the collector about the bad quality of the footwear issued to lepers by the government. It was an absurd yet poignant detail, making Nizamabad town feel suddenly like a magical-realist setting, a feeling that was enhanced as we walked back to the collector’s office and saw nearly 100 children appear from nowhere, gathering in the courtyard and shouting slogans.

The children were very small, perhaps between eight and ten, looking colourful in spite of their shabby clothes as they fluttered around the office like butterflies holding a demonstration. A group of policemen came running into the courtyard, holding sticks and automatic weapons, their expressions turning foolish and confused when they realized that their adversaries were children. A dozen adults were visibly directing the children, whom they asked to squat in the courtyard while holding their placards and keeping up their chants. Prabhakar spoke to the men and found out that they were members of a village committee who had brought the children here because the government hadn’t filled vacant positions at the local school. But the collector remained on his conference call and refused to meet the children. Instead, in keeping with the refinement of Indian bureaucracy, the collector’s deputy, who had the designation of ‘joint collector’, dispatched her ‘camp clerk’ to take their ‘petition’. The children left after presenting their case, and so did the collector, surrounded by a flurry of attendants and officials as he disappeared into a white Toyota Innova with an official red light revolving on top. Prabhakar turned to me with an embarrassed look on his face and suggested that we try again another day.

The village of Hasakothur was about sixty kilometres from Nizamabad town, a small cluster of houses and huts separated from National Highway 16 by fields of soy, maize and turmeric. In the late afternoon, when I arrived there, it seemed peaceful and slow, caught in the winding down of a work day that had begun just before dawn. It was a village of 5,000 residents, with the plots closer to the average size owned by Indian farmers – four to five acres rather than the twenty or so owned by the rich men of Ankapur.

Gopeti Rajeshwar was one of the farmers who worked on his own land. He had short, cropped hair and a moustache and was wearing a green lungi and a white vest that showed his powerful arms and sturdy build. He also possessed the calm, pragmatic air that seemed to
be characteristic of farmers. Although he was more vocal than the other men who gathered around us, it took a while to get information out of him. He talked at a slow, steady pace, and even when he was discussing the suicides and the difficulties faced by farmers, he did so calmly, with only the occasional twitch of his lips to indicate emotion.

We sat on a bench outside the house of a man known as Dr Satyanarayana, a member of Prabhakar’s party. Dr Satyanarayana wasn’t really a doctor. He had been trained as a compounder and used the skill to provide much-needed medical services to the villagers. He was a small, friendly man, urging the farmers to talk to me but also content to leave Gopeti and me alone.

Like everybody else in the village, Gopeti had decided to supply red sorghum to Mahipal because the price offered had been very good. It was also relatively easy to grow red sorghum, he said, largely because it didn’t need as much water as other crops. Once he had agreed to grow red sorghum, Mahipal’s workers brought the seeds to the village, leaving them in the building that served as an office for the farmers’ association. The seeds were in sacks of six kilos, each sack sold to a farmer for 300 rupees.

Gopeti took three sacks, which cost him 900 rupees. He spent another 1,800 rupees on a pesticide called Protex and on urea for fertilizer. The rest depended on his labour and skill. He had taken the seeds in November and expected the crop to be ready in four months. According to his calculations, three sacks would produce 3,600 kilos of seeds. For a total investment of roughly 3,000 rupees, he would make around 55,000 rupees – nearly twenty times the initial outlay – which sounded like a huge margin but did not take into account the labour involved in the process. The harvesting took about two days, with Gopeti and his family cutting the stalks by hand and depositing the seeds in the farmers’ association office.

But the red sorghum remained in the office for weeks on end, with Mahipal refusing to send his men to collect the seeds. There were farmers from nearly 100 villages facing such a situation, and they eventually banded together and went to meet the collector in Nizamabad. The farmers knew that there were things happening that had
made Mahipal’s position rather precarious. Gopeti said that there were other dealers who were jealous of Mahipal and who had bought some red sorghum on the sly from a few villages. They took this stock to Mahipal’s buyers and sold it at a very low rate, bringing down the market price of red sorghum. Mahipal hadn’t anticipated such an event. He had expected to make a handsome profit, given the demand in past years for red sorghum, and he had ordered so much seed that he would need a bank loan to pay all the farmers. The sudden dip in the price of red sorghum scared Mahipal, who began to sense that he would have to sell it at a loss, at a rate well below what he had promised the farmers. Mahipal began to stall, Gopeti said, telling the collector that he needed more time to get the money. The farmers began agitating, and eventually converged in Armoor for a day-long protest, travelling there in trucks and buses.

I asked Gopeti who had burned the government jeeps. He avoided answering the question, and that seemed as good as a confession. He was adamant, however, that the farmers had not set fire to Mahipal’s house. He said that it was Anand Reddy, the rival seed dealer, who had hired thugs to mix in with the farmers and destroy Mahipal’s house and that Mahipal, in retaliation, had sent his men to attack Anand’s house. The farmers, he said, had no part in any of this – in fact, some of them felt quite sympathetic towards Mahipal.

Later, when I was no longer in Andhra Pradesh, I would find some videos on YouTube of Mahipal’s house being set on fire. Someone had taken movies with a mobile phone and posted them on the Web. The movies were very short, barely ten seconds each and rather grainy, but they were nevertheless surprisingly evocative: the mob collecting in front of Mahipal’s mansion with its oddly imposing pillars; the shabby, unshaven men hammering away at the windows with iron rods; the view up a stairwell that showed flames rising up in the background.

All this seemed a world away from Hasakothur as I accompanied Gopeti to his farming plot, walking along narrow paths skirting the squares of green and looking out for the piles of shit where farmers had relieved themselves in the course of their work day. A teenage boy was bent over the trunk of a short palm tree, shaking an earthen
pot. He was tapping toddy, to be drunk at home rather than sold, and Gopeti led me up for a closer look. The toddy was pungent and grey in colour, and large, drunken ants swarmed all over the pot. We walked on, passing a depression in the ground that was overgrown with weeds. It was a water tank, Gopeti said, but it had been dry for over a decade.

Most of the farmers depended for water on electrical pumps that they called borewells. The borewells were expensive, around 50,000 rupees each, and then there was the cost of putting the borewells in. The small companies that the farmers hired for this charged 150 rupees for each foot they went down, and often they had to dig to at least 250 feet to find groundwater. Even then, there was no guarantee that water would be found, and sometimes it was necessary to sink a dozen or more holes in a five-acre plot before striking water, each dig costing the farmers more money and putting them further in debt.

It was a cycle of diminishing returns. The area of Telangana received little rainfall and had only two perennial rivers, the Krishna and the Godavari. But the influence of the market and its tendency towards crop monocultures had made farmers switch from their older practice of growing millets – small-seeded grasses that require relatively little water – to the more commercially dominant and thirsty crops of cotton, maize and soybean. The Congress government that succeeded Naidu had criticized his policies and promised to bring irrigation canals to ten million acres of farmland, but after four years in power, an expert in Hyderabad told me, not a single acre had been brought under irrigation even though 600 billion rupees had been handed out to contractors.